Menu

Abortion (Conservatives)

For as much as they talk about responsibility and morality, I feel justified in saying – and I hope that I will show – that on the issue of abortion, conservatives are repulsively hypocritical and ignorant. So, let’s start at the beginning:

The fundamental assumption that undergirds the entire (flimsy-ass) conservative argument is that “abortion” (loosely-defined, but more on that later) is always “murder.” They view it as an evil, selfish, and irresponsible choice and they seem to believe they are tasked with codifying their religiously-based conception of the moral status of abortion into secular law. This is unbelievably ironic considering their supposed “small government” philosophy and their cries about government infringement on freedoms of belief.

The conservative chestnut is that those heathen liberals just want abortion to be legal out of “convenience” – an easy “out” from their sexual irresponsibility and promiscuity. As you know, this is similar to the progressive position on gun control, namely “you never know what kind you’ll need or when you’ll need it, so let’s keep them all legal and unregulated…”

Oh, wait…that’s…yeah, nevermind.

Take for example, this article from RedState. WARNING: this post contains a graphic picture of what looks to be a bloody, aborted fetus (I’m not a doctor and I have no knowledge about the authenticity of the picture), but it is accompanied by this caption: “Such perfect hands and feet. So small – so dead; His head literally ripped off while he was alive.”

Yup – for real.

So here’s their argument (and headline):

SEVEN OUT OF TEN AMERICANS CHOOSE THE CONVENIENCE OF ABORTION:

Seven Out of Ten Americas Agree We Should All Just Lighten Up and Have a Cheeseburger.

Without a strong central values system guiding a society, it becomes focused on the individual, which thrusts individuals into competition with one another and deprives them of any larger identity, purpose or context. The result is a society composed of people acting for personal pleasure, which leads them to neglect others and their own families, and abuse each other out of aggressive competition for social status. Modern society is the antithesis of health.

So clear and logical. And it goes so well with their arguments about “free market competition” being beneficial for society.

The nefarious assumption conservatives about women who choose to have abortions is that they are necessarily selfish, irresponsible, and immoral creatures who knowingly and willingly commit cold-blooded murder – they literally describe the “pro-abortionists” as “evil.” From RedState:

The effects of the “chipping away” actions is that self described pro-life folks get to claim that progress is being made on the issue and feel good about their efforts, while placating pro-lifers. When such bills are widely supported by pro-abortion politicians like former Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna that should be a red flag. The real implication of bills such as these is this: We Surrender. When bills like this pass and get labeled as “ pro life legislation,” we’re admitting that abortion is a right and should be legal. Not to mention that these bills are so ineffective at curtailing abortion that more and more laws need to be passed to maintain the appearance of pro life action.

A far better and simpler approach is to introduce and pass one bill that doesn’t create new law; rather it correctly defines two simple words: Human Being. Representative Jason Overstreet of Washington State’s 42nd Legislative District has introduced such a bill. It is House Bill 1259. It’s sponsored by his fellow Freedom Agenda team members Rep. Matthew Shea, Rep. David Taylor, Rep. Cary Condotta and Rep. Elizabeth Scott, among others. The correct and irrefutable definition of the word “human” simply mandates that all innocent life be treated the same. This simple bill corrects the false understanding that abolishing abortion is a complicated matter that requires copious amounts of new law. It tells the world “We are not attempting to create new laws, we just want the current laws against murder applied to all people.” When we recognize that all human beings, born and unborn, are created equal and are endowed by God with the same unalienable rights, there will be no need to even use the word “abortion.” Instead, we will simply say “murder” and call abortionists what they truly are, murderers.

I think that quote (my bolding) kind of shows you…They’re not about making it safe, legal, and rare. Their “Freedom Agenda” is acutally about taking women’s freedom of reproductive healthcare choices away from them. It’s insane – and especially hypocritical to this “Obamacare-is-a-government-takeover-of-my-healthcare” crowd. I mean, I don’t know how you expect to get elected with a position this extreme. The Supreme Court said that “choice” was a constitutional right. We already had this fight. Not to mention that even when the “pro-abortion” crowd agrees with them, they see it as a sign of deception. If you want to have a debate about when “life” “begins,” then let’s do it based on science, not your baseless, nonsense assumptions and accusations.

This author is literally saying that those “seven out of ten” Americans mentioned above are supporters of “murder.” That’s completely whacko – can you imagine if progressives started saying that the 6 out of 10 Americans who support the death penalty supported “murder?” Or that the Supreme Court made “murder” legal by upholding the constitutionality of capital punishment?

But this is the reality conservatives live in. Abortion is murder and no one realizes it except for them. And they absurdly and constantly complain about “pro-abortion” bias in the media (seems they’re still smarting from getting dissed by the AP Stylebook).

First, their more general complaint: libs don’t “get” that it’s really “murder…”

In a Wednesday Salon column which should be saved onto the hard drives of everyone in the pro-life movement as a reminder of the fundamental evil of their opposition, Mary Elizabeth Williams stated why, to her, it doesn’t matter that abortion involves the taking of a human life: “I believe that life starts at conception. And it’s never stopped me from being pro-choice.”

Man. That sounds pretty bad. Tell me more.

The establishment press has consistently refused to apply the “pro-life” label [see the AP style link] to a movement which has always been not only about ending abortion, but about respecting and protecting human life from conception to natural death. I believe that refusal has occurred because many reporters share Ms. Williams’s brutal, strongly held but rarely expressed beliefs articulated after the jump. The Salon staff writer proves that her side richly deserves to be called “anti-life” — because that’s what they are.

Again with the hypocrisy. They don’t respect life. They want to “end abortion” and force living women to continue dangerous and unwanted pregnancies no matter what – and they want the State to enforce their religiously-based rules for “life” (sound like their position gay marriage? Yeah…)

Those are portions of Ms. Williams article, which ends with the comments of:

And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.

Yes, the temptation to justify wrong behavior is definitely being exhibited in this article, is it not? Of course, one of the problems of relative moral standards is that it sears the human conscience causing human beings to become numb on the inside to the low standards consuming their life and the scope of wrong behavior that they are willingly embracing.

Again, they seem to simply ignore the possibility that a mother could be in danger from the pregnancy (as noted here, giving birth is more dangerous than getting an abortion) or that the fetus may not even be able to survive if carried to term. But undeterred, NewsBusters goes on to take personal potshots at specific members of the press (thankfully they generally stayed away from personal attacks on abortion patients – their peers didn’t, but you can see that below).

In this article, they mock MSNBC’s Touré Neblett’s personal story of how ‘abortion was there to save [him]’ and his partner from an unplanned pregnancy. They wrote that MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell “continued the MSNBC tradition of praising the abortion rights movement and harassing the pro-life movement” on the fortieth anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. The next day they ran this very ominous sounding piece about Mitchell sometimes reporting facts about political issues involving abortion and contraception. Even though they had just claimed Mitchell “savaged” the pro-life activist she had on her show, NewsBusters also pointed out that MSNBC had on “prominent feminist and liberal darling” Sandra Fluke (probably better known as they Georgetown Law student whom Rush Limbaugh repeatedly called a “slut” on the air), and claimed that MSNBC “dares not bring on anyone who would challenge Flukian orthodoxy on the sacred right to employer-subsidized contraception, even if it causes the employer to violate his or her conscience.”

Setting the whole “media bias” thing aside, let me quickly address the religious and moral language the right uses (all the time, but especially with abortion.) Who in their right mind calls contraception “a sacred right,” or abortion a “sacrament?” And this “freedom of religion” argument is complete BS. NewsBusters actually cites this fact in the article:

According to Politico, under the new policy announced by the Obama Administration:

Women will still be able to get the same health benefits, but certain religious employers won’t have to pay for them. Instead, institutions that insure themselves can use a third-party to find a separate health insurance plan to pay for and provide the contraceptives.

In addition to the misinformation about violations of religious rights, there was a continued assault on “radical New York leftist Governor Andrew Cuomo.” <- That piece from Breitbart accuses him of “pushing abortion on demand.” RedState went after Cuomo ad hominem in their article “Andrew Cuomo decides to be even MORE pro-abortion:”

…Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is putting the finishing touches on legislation that would guarantee women in New York the right to late-term abortions when their health is in danger or the fetus is not viable.

…

Besides: not to be slightly low-rent about it, but Andrew Cuomo’s currently shacking up with a live-in girlfriend. That alone is going to sink him.

Did you hear that? That damn leftist Cuomo wants women to be able to chose to have a medical procedure that could possibly save their lives. Probably gonna knock up his ‘live-in’ girlfriend and then pop on over to the abortion clinic for his abortion on demand. Any good pro-life conservative knows that life-saving medical procedures must be outlawed and the government must restrict people’s choices when it comes to their health care – like they did with Obamacare. Conservatives love Obamacare, right?

Then, NewsBusters really socked it to the liberal media:

Guess what, MSNBC? Two women appeared at the hearings you said were “all male.” Na na na na boo boo. And then this “phlblblbbbbpbpbbhbpbhb” that starts with the headline “Not News…” Continuing with their stated mission of “exposing and combating liberal media bias,” they combatively exposed NBC for “grilling” Justin Bieber’s mom (no, seriously) about her involvement in an “anti-abortion” film and they hammered the networks for talking about Manti Te’o and Subway sandwiches instead of their precious March for Life.

Speaking of which, let’s hear some of their whining about their 40-year long struggle not to be ignored by “seven out of ten Americans.” Here, they hit the New York Times for pointing out that some of the “legitimate rape” stuff might have hurt the GOP’s chances with the women vote (major bias alert!), claiming that the NYT “buried” the March for Life among some anti-gun nonsense. Hot Air echoed these complaints.

Apparently, ABC and CBS also gave too much attention to a tiny anti-gun protest while the conservatives’ big ‘half-million-person’ March for Life was going on. NewsBusters laments that the 40-year-old March for Life “is likely to pass with limited, if any,notice from a national news media which is hostile to he pro-life cause” (original emphasis.) They also claim that the Sundance film festival and NBC’s series ‘Parenthood‘ promote abortion simply by acknowledging that it exists.

Get with it, guys. The country has left you behind – as they’ve done on nearly every other issue. It’s time to stop repeating the same old nonsense and rejoin the rest of the world in the 21st century.

This kind of media-bias pablum was repeated so many times I simply have to stop listing them, but “media bias” is something I’ll address in the moderates post. I’ll just give one final piece from NewsBusters that illustrates their other favorite tactic. In this article, they take the Williams article and generalize her out-of-context (and satirical) statements to all “liberals.” Again, the ridiculous assumption is that liberals are the suckers in some government conspiracy to keep abortion legal so they can kill as many babies as possible with your tax money. Honestly, I’m sick of debunking all this kind of paranoid crap, so I’ll just get on with their ‘argument.’

I really love Hot Air and Ed Morrissey. You can get a full serving of right-wing idiocy in a single 500-word post. Morrissey starts off with a bang:

Today is the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade which transformed abortion from a procedure regulated on a state-by-state basis into a Constitutional right, emanating from invisible penumbras.

Wrong, as usual. Abortion is and has been regulated on a state-by-state basis (sometimes to the point of nearly eliminating access to it, as discussed in the moderates and progressives posts.) He continues:

To put this in perspective, consider the fact that the US had approximately 142,394,000 births for the first 39 years of Roe. Assuming for the moment that 2012 added as many births as 2011, the number rises to 146.348 million. That means that abortions accounted for 28% of all known pregnancy outcomes in the US during this 40-year period. We literally threw away more than a quarter of human beings waiting to be born since Roe.

This 55 million number was harped on again and again and again, just like everything else (yes, there are more examples to come), but again, considering the fact that 1/3 American women will undergo an abortion in their lifetimes, it’s not that shocking.

RedState published this insane rant on PETA, Pampers, free market capitalism, and, of course, Ronald Reagan, where the author seems to blame Roe for pretty much everything that’s wrong with America:

Of course, Roe didn’t require anyone to abort their baby, but rather than close their boxes, too many Americans jumped in and killed shame; aided and abetted by the diminutive stature of abortion’s victims. The Judeo-Christian principles preached by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. apparently having been spent, and thus overcome by the prospect of having one’s sexual gratification cake and eating it too, America proceeded post-Roe to:

Abandon the Hmong and Vietnamese, who with our help had secured most of the nation, to Communist tyranny;

Exalt the creation above both the Creator and those for whom the Creator created Earth and its contents for;

Saddle future generations with debt to pay for the present’s luxuries; and

Re-elect a President more interested in a government takeover of health care (and thus totalitarian power over our lives) than an economic, individual liberty-empowering recovery; and uninterested in ending cross-generational theft.

I bolded the word “shame” there, because it’s important. This is a rare admission of their true intentions. They claim to be about helping women and creating a culture of life, but what they really want is a culture of sexual shame. I know that I’m getting all demagogic on this issue, but you go read a months worth of blog posts that are filled with sexism and ignorance and bigotry and see what you come up with…

This idiotic article from Breitbart repeats the “abortion on demand” trope:

Abortion advocates, then, hope to legalize late-term abortions in New York, with legal coverage for doctors who perform them, if a woman’s health is at risk, not just her life. It would seem that the word “health” could be interpreted fairly broadly.

Yeah, moron, that’s exactly the idea. We want to protect the lives and the health of the people who already have lives, and jobs, and families of their own. Then, in a hapless attempt to back up the argument, the author quotes the evildoers over at Planned Parenthood:

We need to fix a troubling gap in New York’s abortion law. A woman can experience serious health complications at any point during pregnancy. This is a tragic situation, often meaning she has to choose between protecting her health or continuing with a very wanted but risky pregnancy. Current New York law compounds that tragedy when it happens late in pregnancy by making it a potential crime to provide an abortion to protect her health.

Have I mentioned that we haven’t gotten to the really crazy stuff yet?

Of course, the conservatives wouldn’t want to seem “low-rent,” but they didn’t have any qualms about revealing the identity of and personal details about a woman who died during a late-term abortion procedure (along with photos of her…and of course, unfounded accusations that the doctor “killed” her and her baby – he had ties to Sebelius!…No mention of the fact that less that 1% of all abortions are “late-term,” no mention of the overwhelming safety of the procedure in general.) I’ll follow the progressive blogs’ lead and leave the personal details out of it, but the basic line came from “Human Events” through some lazy, copy-and-pasting chump at RedState. From the original:

There hasn’t been much Big Media coverage for the death of a 29-year-old pregnant woman during a botched 33rd-week abortion under the knife of late-term abortion superstar Dr. LeRoy Carhart, at his clinic in Maryland. Thus far, the only information about the incident has come from pro-life group Operation Rescue.

As I write this, I realize that no amount of information will really change anyone’s mind on this issue, so I’m just going to post everything I read on this issue here and let you judge for yourself. In fact, I’m done trying to tie this into a narrative, take a look at these quotes and draw what conclusions you wish from them:

The feminist vision of subjugation is the “barefoot and pregnant” woman shackled to her kitchen. Pregnancy itself is viewed as a form of oppression, which is how abortion becomes a sacrament of liberation. People with such a world-view become very, very upset at the suggestion that responsible choices should have been made before conception.

Again with the “sacrament” thing? And what kind of responsible choices should women be making to ensure that their pregnancies (yes, the ones they had originally hoped for) don’t wind up putting their lives at risk?

RedState: “I’ll Give You My Guns, If You Close Down Your Abortion Clinics”

Reasonable Ross: Did you know there are more abortions taking place in this country than mass shootings?

To pro-abortion organization NARAL, the decision to have an abortion is just another, everyday choice a girl or woman has the right to make, just like which dress or hairstyle to wear, or whether or not to go for a jog in the park, or chew gum.

Go as a woman who’s had an abortion if she gave even a glancing thought to her hair when trying to make that decision.

Today is the sad 40th anniversary of the travesty of Roe v. Wade. For those of you who may not remember, Kermit Gosnell is the monster (forget all that alleged crap) who: murdered eight babies because he couldn’t abort them (he induced labor, then stabbed them to death with scissors); murdered at least one woman after aborting her baby; may have murdered other women aborting their babies; maimed countless other women aborting their babies, in some cases leaving parts of the dead baby in the womb; and, left body parts of the aborted fetuses lying around, sometimes in jars. The Pennsylvania Department of Health not only had not inspected Gosnell’s butcher shop for nearly 20 years, they made it a point not to inspect ANY abortion mills during that time (this started when the GOP’s pro-abortion Tom Ridge was governor, and continued during pro-abortion Democrat Gov. Ed Rendell’s administration).

Isn’t this an argument for better government regulation of abortions, not outlawing them? And by the way, there’s no connection between this guy and Roe.

(Headline:) ‘WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN NO ONE’S EXPECTING': BOOK REVEALS LEFT’S DREAM OF CHILD-FREE AMERICA

(nuff said)

If by now I haven’t proven to you that everything conservatives believe about abortion is based on moralizing, pseudo-religious gobbledygook, sexual shame, and ignorance of not only facts, but also of the plight of people who may find themselves in a situation in which abortion is the best option for everyone involved – if I haven’t convinced you that the right wing is borderline insane on this topic, then let me leave you with these last two completely nonsensical pieces:

In this article, RedState (somewhat) falsely accuses Margaret Sanger for being a “racist and eugenicist,” and then says (paraphrasing) “even she was against abortion” (so you’re agreeing with the liberals and the racist/eugenicist, then?) Thankfully, liberals care about facts and you can get the real story on Sanger here.

But finally, (since this post is way more than long enough already) I’ll leave you with this. I think it speaks for itself.

Baltimore meets San Francisco in New Orleans on Super Bowl Sunday, with any gold left in them thar’ 49ers’ hills expected to reach an all-time high price in 2013 thanks to a Raven(ou)s attack on the GDP in the fourth quarter of 2012. Cockstradamus, with access to Leonard’s Losers’ Smart Pill Machine, sees Poe’s deer antler-sprayed black birds losing to Culliver’s un-sweet goldigger stuff by a score of 24-17.

Meanwhile, hopes that President Barack Obama’s imaginary son could one day play for an NFL championship took a hit last week as Michelle’s husband declared:

“I’m a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” he said in the interview. “And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence.

“In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.”

Beware when Barack thinks long and hard, especially if you are a baby born alive after a botched abortion in Illinois. Beware when Obama examines his conscience. Just ask those North Carolinians who relied upon his un-evolved thinking on marriage, now deemed to be homophobic bigots for clinging to Obama’s former decades-long opposition to same-sex marriage. And if you think Mr. Cool isn’t hip to excitement reduction, just look at his economic recovery from anywhere but near a Fortune 500 company’s stock portfolio.

Concussions sustained in non-federal regulated happiness pursuits are the latest caring fetish of Obama and the Democratic Party; following closely on the heels of their concern for smokers, law students forced to pay for their own contraception, warm winters, and jumbo Coke drinkers.

Much more Obamacaring on par with the last four years and more and more Americans may welcome concussions as a better alternative. Witness the significant increase in disability claims and suicides. Yet, an electoral majority refused to echo Edgar Allen Poe’s refrain: